Three's the charm

Hey there,

Today, I'll start my blog by answering to the comments and questions I received between Friday and today. I'll start off by the most important one, namely that I wish to apologize to my colleagues, whom I talked about in my previous blog. Though I may unwillingly have done so, it was never my intention to offend or create a bad image of these people. They are great people and I share lots of enjoyable moments with them. I hope people can forget what I said and are able to forgive me for my choice of words.

I don't know if I have said it before but I'd like to stress the point that everything written in this blog is solely my opinion and view on things around here, and do therefor not always necessarily represent a truthful depiction of reality here.


Then, I had the question what I do in my free time. The main things I do here at this moment is keeping in touch with girlfriend, family and friend at home. Zürich is approximately 800km away from my doorstep, so that's quite a long distance to overcome.
When I'm not doing that, I usually spend my time surfing the internet, watching tv, ATC'ing on IVAO, playing the piano, continuing on a novel I'm writing (in Dutch, so I can't really put an excerpt on here) or studying/reading through my lesson material.

Furthermore, before going into the details of what happened yesterday and today, I'd like to thank those wishing us the best.:-)

But now, the real reason you're all reading this blog.

A new week again, number 3 already, and we start it with 2-hour blocks of RTB, FPL, ADY and RAT. Talked about lots of stuff throughout the day, including transponder mode S, ATC messages, drag/lift and ranges of radio signals.
Yesterday's biggest shock to me was to find out a B777 has the capability of retracting its wingtips, allowing it to park at 'smaller' gates. Not that it's of any concern for our line of work, or at least I hope they don't try it at FL330, but it's still nice to know.

Today, we started with 2 hours of BRT (not to be confused with RTB), 1 hour each of ACD and ACT (in which we had a progress test, which was the reason I didn't blog yesterday, and I believe I did pretty good), 1 hour of MET (aha, a new kid on the block) followed by yet another block of BRT (Jenny didn't want to miss us for too long, I suppose) and 2 hours of AGA in which Bruce already started reviewing the lessons a bit. Not really a surprise, knowing that AGA will be our first real exam, coming up 11th of November already. I can throw a list of our exam schedule online, if you wish. Just say so in the comments, and I'll do it ASAP.

To end the day, we had our first Video Conference (hereafter VC) with Maastricht, in which we got to know our Maastricht training leaders who discussed several things such as training schedule, arrangements for Luxembourg etc with us.
Today's biggest surprise to me came in this VC. It was the fact that a resit (a second try) on an exam is not a guarantee, whereas I used to think it actually was. Not that I was planning on using the resit, but it felt a bit more comfortable thinking there's at least a back-up parachute strapped to your shoulders while you're falling down.

That's it for today. Tomorrow, we have an entire day of TRM to chew on. Erik already mentioned something about it being more active than what we're used to, so I'm guessing we won't be just introducing ourselves to the group anymore. If anyone can ellaborate before tomorrow morning 7 a.m., please do so.


See you around.